Exploring Climate Change Impacts on Upper Peninsula Soils
Print
EmailAn exciting new project launched this year in the Kravchenko Lab and it promises to have a broad impact across PSM and the wider Michigan research community.
Exploring Climate Change Impacts on Upper Peninsula Soils
An exciting new project launched this year in the Kravchenko Lab and it promises to have a broad impact across PSM and the wider Michigan research community. The study—Agricultural soils of Michigan’s UP in changing climate: impact on soil health and food safety —is evaluating how varying precipitation and fluctuating temperatures affect soils in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (UP) over time. Drs. James Dedecker and Wei Zhangare the project coPIs.
The UP is among the Michigan regions most vulnerable to changing climate conditions, with particularly profound implications for its agricultural systems. This study focuses on two components of the soil ecosystem that are both highly sensitive to climatic changes and central to productive agriculture: soil structure, soil carbon dynamics, and heavy metal and contaminant transport.
Fieldwork in the Upper Peninsula
This new initiative integrates field observations, laboratory experiments, and long-term soil monitoring to better understand how soils respond to a changing environment.
The project officially kicked off with a field campaign from May 12–14, 2025, when the Kravchenko team traveled to the UP to collect samples. The team gathered 72 deep soil cores—each approximately 100 cm deep and 7.5 cm in diameter—from nine different sites, including both natural vegetation areas and agricultural fields.
Testing across the climate gradient from the UP to Kentucky
Back in the lab, the cores were thoroughly characterized with the guidance of Dr. Barret Wessel and subjected to X-ray computed tomography scanning before being divided into three groups and reburied, intact, at three separate locations across a climatic gradient. Specifically, the three locations are (i) MSU’s Chatham Experimental Station representing the current UP weather patterns, (ii) MSU’s agronomy farm in East Lansing, representing the temperature gradients anticipated to reach UP in 20 year time frame, and (iii) an experimental site in Lexington, KY, representing much warmer and wetter climatic conditions. The latter site is a part of collaboration between Kravchenko’s lab and Department of Plant and Soil Sciences at the University of Kentucky. These buried cores will be resamples yearly, for five years, to assess long-term changes in soil structure and carbon storage potential.
Building a Foundation for Future Insights
“The project will be instrumental to addressing so many important questions,” says Dr. Kravchenko, project lead. “How will soil structure and pore architecture in agricultural soils respond to changing weather patterns in the UP? How might these changes affect the soil’s ability to protect existing organic matter and store new carbon? And how can sustainable management practices help mitigate the effects of precipitation and temperature shifts?”
While not all these questions can be fully answered within a single project, Kravchenko and her team aim to lay the groundwork for future breakthroughs. The project will integrate field data from previous studies, new laboratory experiments, and synthesis efforts designed to generate the insights needed for future large-scale research proposals.
Expanding on Existing Research
This study also builds on the Kravchenko Lab’s longstanding research on the impacts of changing precipitation patterns on soil properties conducted at Kellogg Biological Station’s LTER, where the team has been investigating how changing precipitation patterns influence soil physical and chemical properties. Together, this research is leading the understanding and management of the impacts of climate change on agricultural soils.
